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Sunday, 23 September 2012

On This Day in Typewriter History: Joy For Royal, Misery for Dempsey, Bliss in Venice, California

OK, I know it's not Misery, but it's Stephen King-inspired nonetheless. See below

PART 126

Royal’s
first portable typewriter was launched in September 1926. It entered an already
fiercely competitive marketplace, which had been dominated for the preceding six
years by Remington, Corona and Underwood. Up to 1926, the Corona 3, Underwood
three-bank and Remington four-bank had sold 875,200 units between them.

George Ed Smith

But Royal
president George Ed Smith had a brainwave about to how to let Americans know,
coast-to-coast, that the Royal portable had also arrived on the scene.

Smith secured
a $35,000 exclusive sponsorship deal with the NBC Radio Network to broadcast
the Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney world heavyweight boxing championship match in
Philadelphia, purely to promotea then untested product. The bout was held on this day, September 23, in 1926.

Royal’s
money paid for the first nationwide radio hook-up for a live broadcast of the
fight commentary – and of course the Royal portable was plugged all the way
through the 10, three-minute rounds at the Sesquicentennial Stadium.

The Daily News of New York estimated
that 20 million people listened to the broadcast (there was a record crowd of 120,557
at the venue itself).

Graham McNamee

Phillips Carlin

Presumably
some of those who survived the excitement of the commentary - provided by NBC­­’s
staff announcer Graham McNamee (blow-by-blow) and WEAF manager Phillips Carlin
(colour) (see below) - went out and bought Royal portable typewriters, because more than 100,000 of
these first models had been sold by the end of 1928.

At the
Polo Grounds in New York on September 14, 1923, Dempsey had survived a resounding first-round belt on the chin from Argentinean Luis Ángel Firpo, resulting in a
cut on the back of his neck from Jack Lawrence’s Corona 3 portable typewriter. But Dempsey couldn’t outpoint Tunney. The New Yorker tooka unanimous decision to become the new world
champion. (See my blog post on Dempsey’s conflab with Lawrence’s Corona 3 here.

Dempsey
is seen here using a Royal 10 typewriter.

Here
is Dempsey using another Royal - on June 12, 1949,
in Fargo, North Dakota, while helping footballer-turned-wrestler Bronko Nagurski
promote a wrestling match (for which Dempsey was referee). They were
photographed together at theFargo Forum and
Daily Tribune’s sports department.
According to the newspaper, “Nagurski … told the former world heavyweight
boxing champion that he must have punched faster in his ring days than he does
on a typewriter.”

Typewritten Dempsey letter, written just after the first Tunney fight

Also
prominently featuring a Royal 10 typewriter was the 1990 movie Misery. Stephen King began writing the
book of the same name in Lovell, Massachusetts, on this day in 1984. He
finished it in Bangor, Maine, on October 7, 1986. It was published the next
year. (It's a later model Royal portable in the dustjacket above, and something else below).

The
“grinning” Royaltypewriter (it had no letter “N”, and was said to have a missing “tooth”)
was used for writing and fighting – though, unlike the Dempsey bouts, the
latter was not under Marquess of Queensbury rules.

James Caan as Paul Sheldon in Misery

This
lack of fight rules was, I believe, what might have appealed to a man called Wes Wheeler about Stephen
King’s works (see image, top of post).

Above and below: A young Stephen King at his typewriter

So enamoured with King books and movies was Wheeler that he had
themes from them tattooed on his back and arms. A photo of Wheeler, taken by
Jody Cobb, appeared in TheNational
Geographicof
January 2000 in an article titled “The Enigma of Beauty”. See my blog post on it here. “Getting
the tattoo was painful,” Wheeler was quoted as saying. “But sometimes I look in
the mirror and say, ‘Wow, that's beautiful, and it's on me’.”
Wheeler’s tattoo took 70 hours to complete.

Mention of
Stephen King allows me the opportunity to ask: Have you ever seen this very
funny clip?:

Wouldn’t
be great if today’s Southern California Type-In lasted 70 hours (which would almost
give me enough time to fly there for it). The Type-In is being held in Venice,
California, and Gary Nicholson’s movie The
Typewriter (In the 21st Century) (it’s much more pleasing to the eyes than Misery, let me assure you) will be shown during it. There will be a private screenings of the film from 1pm-5pm at Beyond
Baroque, 681 Venice Boulevard.

4 comments:

I cannot wait for the type-in! We'll be there with four machines. I feel like a little kid on Christmas Eve; I can't sleep!

Very interesting sports history! Sometimes I wonder which of my machines came out of a journalists' office or home. And I'm always wondering what was written on them before they found their ways to me.

Stephen King is one of my favorite authors, and it is actually because of him that I write fiction now. His work inspired me from an early age to take up writing. And that tattoo that is an ode to his work is fantastic. Seeing the Royal in there among the other images makes me want to get that perfect photo of Gargoyle (the Oliver 3) to take to a local ink shop and see what happens!

Thanks for the very interesting post on Royal and especially the part about KDKA and the first coast to coast broadcast. Most of that I never heard even when working in radio in several markets in PA and spending most of my life in PA.

Kia Ora!

Tapping gingerly. Sunday morning, coming down.
Might be my third or fourth attempt to establish a blog. Steeled to make it work this time. All about typewriters. Typewriters in Australia. Ergo, "oz.Typewriter", something a bit different. Please enjoy.